Is the 20-year-old founder a lie? "Forget what you’ve heard about 22-year-old wunderkinds, sitting in the corner offices of their wildly popular Silicon Valley startups — if you want to find the most successful entrepreneurs, you have to go back a few decades. According to a working paper from MIT Sloan professor Pierre Azoulay and PhD student Daniel Kim, the average age of entrepreneurs who’ve started companies and gone on to hire at least one employee is 42 years old. 'If you knew nothing else, and you had two identical ideas, one proposed by a very young person, one proposed by a middle-aged person, and that’s the only thing you have to go on, you would be better off — if you wanted to predict success — betting on a middle-aged person,' Azoulay said."

Human Resources

Contract worker or employee? A court ruling could upend gig-economy business models: "The court essentially scrapped the existing test for determining employee status, which was used to assess the degree of control over the worker. That test hinged on roughly 10 factors, like the amount of supervision and whether the worker could be fired without cause. In its place, the court erected a much simpler 'ABC' test that is applied in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Under that test, the worker is considered an employee if he or she performs a job that is part of the 'usual course' of the company’s business. By way of an example, the court said a plumber hired by a store to fix a bathroom leak would not reasonably be considered an employee of that store. But seamstresses sewing at home using materials provided by a clothing manufacturer would probably be considered employees. ... While companies like Uber have had some success arguing that they don’t exert sufficient control over drivers to be considered employers, it would be hard to assert that drivers are performing a task that isn’t a standard feature of their business."

How does Alibaba hire tech talent? By promising goddesses: "In one online job recruitment video for male technicians posted by Alibaba, China's largest internet company, the narrator says chosen candidates will work with a staff of beautiful women. The narrator promises there are 'goddesses' working at Alibaba who are 'smart and competent at work and charming and alluring in life.' 'They are independent but not proud, sensitive but not melodramatic. They want to be your coworkers. Do you want to be theirs?' the narrator says."

Does anti-bias training work? "According to five social scientists I spoke to who study racial bias, a few hours of training won’t begin to solve the problem that infects corporations like Starbucks. 'We should be skeptical of the training’s ability to transform, in any meaningful way, white workers’ biases toward black customers,' said Hakeem J. Jefferson, a political science PhD candidate at the University of Michigan. That’s because the evidence we have suggests trainings generally fail to alter racial biases and behaviors in the long term — and can even backfire. So this one may do no more good than Starbucks’s failed attempt to spark conversations about race by asking baristas to write 'race together' on coffee cups. '[Starbucks] felt they needed to make a symbolic gesture,' Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin told me. 'The problem is that corporate America has been making this symbolic gesture since the 1970s.'"

Commuting to San Francisco? Even the ferries are crowded: "Everyone knows traffic is impossible and BART is jammed. That’s one reason for a boom in commuting by ferry. Ridership on the San Francisco-Alameda-Oakland run is up 115 percent over what it was five years ago, and the San Francisco-Vallejo ferries are carrying 66 percent more passengers than they were back then. On most weekday afternoons, the lines for the Vallejo and Oakland ferries snake back from the docks to the front of the San Francisco Ferry Building, and sometimes passengers have to be left behind. And at the Larkspur terminal of the Golden Gate ferries, a 2,000-car parking lot is now simply not big enough."

Location, Location

Are you sure you want to win Amazon's HQ2? "To some locals, Amazon represented something else: more people, more traffic and, most of all, higher rents in a city where a rising share of residents were already struggling to afford a place to live. 'With the onslaught of new people, with the onslaught of higher-income earners, I just think it’s going to further exacerbate what’s already a crisis situation,' said Paulette Coleman, a local affordable-housing advocate. Ms. Coleman has reason to worry. A new analysis from the real estate site Zillow estimates that rents in Nashville would rise 3.3 percent per year if the city landed the Amazon campus, almost four times as fast as currently projected. After a decade, that could translate into Nashville residents paying $400 more per month in extra rent because of the project."

Failure

The founder of a sprawling restaurant empire fights with his investors and considers bankruptcy: "Asked if he had overextended himself, Garces said: 'I think that we grew really fast and we were very excited to do that. I think that from the creative standpoint, and as far as concept development, we were able to keep up.' That said, Garces added: 'I don’t think that maybe our back office was in line to really keep up with the demanding growth.' [The investors] claimed in court papers this year that Garces had renegotiated a massive amount of debt without their knowledge in 2014 — putting up restaurants as collateral. They also said he had improperly ended cash distributions to them."

Taxes

The GOP tax cut has not yet had an impact on business investment: "Is it just too soon to expect results? Are businesses getting ready to ramp up investment, so that we’ll see them laying out the big bucks in the near future? Not according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. A vast majority of businesses say either that the tax law has had no effect on their investment plans, or that they are planning only a modest increase."

Manufacturing

How Trump's tariffs are hitting manufacturers: "Whirlpool appeared to be a beneficiary of Trump’s initial wave of tariffs, which included steep tariffs on imported washing machines. But the appliance maker’s chief executive, Marc Bitzer, told analysts this week the company was raising its raw material inflation guidance for the year by about $50 million to as much as $300 million, 'primarily due to previously announced U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum.'"

Pricing

It's been a rough stretch for MoviePass: "Furious customers have flooded social media sites with complaints about abrupt, unexplained shifts in service and marathon waits for membership cards. Technology glitches have caused headaches. And then there is an auditor’s report that expressed 'substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.' But the men behind MoviePass, a cut-rate, subscription-based service for movie theater tickets, arrived at a film industry convention here this week with a sunny message that many theater owners — and even some MoviePass customers — have a hard time believing: Everything is handled. 'I’m not worried about the viability of MoviePass at all,' said Ted Farnsworth, chief executive of Helios and Matheson Analytics, which owns 92 percent of the service, with Verizon holding the balance."

E-Commerce

Inside Amazon's counterfeit problem: "David Rifkin sells 2,600 items on Amazon through his company MPO Global, and has been selling on the site for nearly 15 years. 'It’s definitely getting worse,' he told me, about the problem of knockoffs appearing on the site. 'These problems come up once a week,' Rifkin said. One of the products he sells, My Critter Catcher, is a device that traps bugs and looks like a pole attached to a plastic gun. My Critter Catcher is patented in the United States and globally, but a few weeks ago, the company saw an identical product pop up on Amazon, which sold for $1 less than My Critter Catcher. Rifkin ordered it to see if it was similar to his product, and found it was exactly the same, he says. When Rifkin initially submitted a complaint to Amazon, he received a reply back a week later, on April 1, asking him to work with the owner of the offending product to 'resolve this dispute.' Amazon did not, at the time, take down the problem listing. Two weeks later, on Friday, April 13, I sent an email to Amazon asking about Rifkin’s allegations. While Amazon did not respond to that specific question when it got back to me on Monday, April 16, the offending listing had been taken down by 1:30 that afternoon. Rifkin was told that Amazon couldn’t disclose why it was removed or what actions were taken against the seller. These battles over counterfeit goods show how Amazon can both be a savior to small businesses, and their downfall."

Human Resources

Facing historic labor shortages, companies are hiring teenagers: "Jerry Stooksbury, the president of Avionics Specialists LLC, needed to produce an airplane instrument panel last fall, but had only two employees able to complete the task quickly. One was out sick. The other was in high school. He called the high-schooler, 17-year-old Thayer McCollum."

This is what an ICE raid feels like: "April 5th began in the usual way at the Southeastern Provision meat-processing plant, in Bean Station, Tennessee—some workers were breaking down carcasses on the production line, while others cleaned the floors—until, around 9 a.m., a helicopter began circling above the plant. Moments later, a fleet of cars pulled up outside. Agents from the I.R.S., Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice), and the Tennessee Highway Patrol emerged, and proceeded to arrest ninety-seven people, most of them originally from Mexico or Guatemala, for working without legal papers. It was the largest workplace roundup of immigrants in a decade. Bean Station is a sleepy lakeside town of three thousand people in eastern Tennessee. The Southeastern Provision plant—located just off the main roadway, past cattle farms and clapboard churches—is made up of a string of dilapidated barn buildings, but it is the third-largest business in Grainger County. Two hundred and fifty head of cattle pass through the plant each day, which translates to roughly thirty million dollars of business every year. After the raid, the I.R.S. said in a court filing that many workers there typically make less than minimum wage, and that the agency believes the owners of the plant, headed by a man named James Brantley, owe the government millions of dollars in back taxes."

Privacy

Facebook is facing tougher questions in the UK than it did in DC: "If American politicians have been lampooned for being Luddites, the British Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has built a reputation for thoroughness and detailed questioning. Damian Collins, the committee’s chairman, had more than 11 pages of questions for Mr. Schroepfer, including how facial recognition technology is used and the methods Facebook uses to track people even when they are not on the site. 'This is the pipe through which the fake news comes, and there doesn’t seem to be much you can do to control it,' Mr. Collins said."

Technology

The transition to a digital company has proved more difficult than GE expected: "The scope of G.E.’s digital ambitions were put on full display in 2015, when the company set up GE Digital as its own business within the industrial conglomerate. Jeffrey R. Immelt, then chief executive, boldly declared G.E.’s goal to become a 'top 10 software company' by 2020. ... No one disputes the overarching vision of the so-called industrial internet of things — which includes low-cost sensors and a flood of data and clever software that should deliver insights to cut costs, conserve fuel and design better products, faster. But the company greatly underestimated the challenges of creating all the software needed to achieve that grand vision, said analysts and former G.E. managers."

Obituary

Larry Harvey, the man behind Burning Man: "New York Times writers have described it as, or compared it to, a 'weeklong cyberhippie carnival,' a 'fringe culturefest,' 'a hallucinogenic state fair,' 'a full-scale countercultural declaration of independence,' 'the internet made flesh' and 'the Whitney Biennial reimagined as a rave party.' Last year’s celebration drew roughly 70,000 participants, who were free to bring or build their own arts projects, perform their own music, dress any way they liked (participants in 'drag races' run on foot, dressed in drag) or go nude — and dance and chant 'Burn the man' during the big finale. That’s when a skeletal five-story-tall wood and neon man-shaped statue, stuffed with fireworks, is set ablaze."